Intro to FOSS (Activity)

Revision as of 22:02, 6 March 2013

Foss in Courses Planning 1

Preparation:

Background:

Welcome to the exploration of Open Source Software!

Directions

Expectations

The world of FOSS is large and complex. Producing a large software project is an complex and challenging process. As learning anything with high complexity, at first the amount to be learned may feel overwhelming. As you incrementally gain knowledge, you will gradually become more familiar with FOSS as well as becoming comfortable with not knowing all aspects of a project. Therefore:

• We expect that you will feel lost. This is a natural feeling when becoming involved in a FOSS project.
• We understand that feeling lost may feel uncomfortable.
• We expect that you may feel overwhelmed, as if you were going to a foreign land not knowing the language and customs.

The goal of this workshop is to enable you to be "productively lost" within a project, where you may not have a full grasp of a project, but you have sufficient signposts for you to be able to navigate the project and ask appropriate questions. The following readings will help explain the use of FOSS projects for learning as well as the feeling of being "productively lost".

• [http://quaid.fedorapeople.org/TOS/Practical_Open_Source_Software_Exploration/html/ch-Foreword.html
• http://quaid.fedorapeople.org/TOS/Practical_Open_Source_Software_Exploration/html/sn-Foreword-Why_Traditional_Student_Projects_Are_Ineffective.html

Overview of FOSS

The following readings provide an introduction to FOSS

• - Sections 1 History, 3.1 Computer Software
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_software - Sections 1-3, 5, 6
• http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/index.html#catbmain
• http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s11.html

Example

• http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s13.html

 Discusses the foundation of Firefox which grew out of Netscape: 

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla - Sections 1, 2.1

Humanitarian FOSS

Humanitarian FOSS (HFOSS) is FOSS that does some social good. HFOSS projects can range from disaster management, micro-finance, health care, education and more. We have chosen to focus on HFOSS as the altruistic nature of HFOSS has the potential to attract more computing majors, and women in particular.